1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the manufacturing of semiconductors, and in particular to a reverse side etching method for strain-induced patterning of semiconductors for producing selectively strained regions on a front-side of the semiconductor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Known crystal growth techniques such as molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) are used to grow semiconductor structures, including heterostructures, with single layer control and very smooth interfaces. To date, very thin layers of semiconductors with different band-gaps may be grown and thus two dimensional (2D) quantum confinement of electrons and holes along the growth direction may be realized. These advances in growth techniques have had a tremendous impact on the physics of lower dimensional systems and semiconductor devices. For photonic applications, as an example, lower dimensional semiconductor structures such as one dimensional (1D) quantum wires or zero dimensional (0D) quantum dots, may offer several major advantages over 2D configurations, such as sharper resonances, which in turn provide better energy selectivity and lower dispersion of the optical properties of these structures over k-states. Higher gain factors for injection lasers based on these semiconductor structures may thus be attained. Additionally, nonlinear effects of such semiconductor structures exhibit lower thresholds due to the smaller number of states to fill to reach saturation and large resonances. This is due to the sharpening of the 1D and 0D density of states as compared with 2D quantum wells.
In particular, strained semiconductor heterostructures have recently gained an increased interest for both scientific and technological applications, motivated by the advantages in achieving fine tuned band-structures that meet design requirements for various electronic and optical devices. However, the introduction of strain patterns to the front-side (usually the growth side) of a substrate of the semiconductor heterostructure, which is generally the active region of the substrate, may be destructive to the sensitivity or performance characteristics of the semiconductor heterostructure.